What is Application Load Balancers?

Application Load Balancers (ALBs) are a type of load balancer that operates at the application layer (Layer 7 of the OSI model). They distribute incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, based on application-level information like HTTP headers and URL paths. ALBs are commonly used to provide advanced routing, content-based routing, support for microservices architectures, and improved security by integrating with services like web application firewalls.